different names. One branch of the Admiralty, as the whole management
is now called, supplies the other with the means to fight. This other
orders everything connected with the fighting fleets. The fighting
fleets themselves are then left to do the best they can.

Henry never forgot for a moment that England could not live a day if
she was not a mighty sea-power. He improved the dockyards founded by
his father at Deptford and Portsmouth. He founded Trinity House, which
still examines pilots and looks after the lights and buoys all round
the British Isles. He put down pirates with a strong hand. And he
brought the best ship-builders he could get from Italy, where the
scientific part of shipbuilding and navigation was then the best in the
world, because the trade routes of Asia, Africa, and Europe mostly met
at Venice. But he always kept his eyes open for good men at home; and
in one of his own shipbuilders, Fletcher of Rye, he found a man who did
more than anybody else to make the vastly important change from the
ancient age of rowing fleets to the modern age of sailing ones.

From the time when the first bit of a wild beast's skin was hoisted by
some pre-historic savage, thousands and thousands of years ago, nobody
had learnt how to tack, that is, to sail against the wind. The only
way any ship could go at all well was with the wind, that is, with the
wind blowing from behind. So long as men had nothing but a single
"wind-bag" of skin or cloth the best wind was a "lubber's wind," that
is, a wind from straight behind. When more and better sails were used
a lubber's wind was not the best because one sail would stop the wind
from reaching another one in front of it. The best wind then, as ever
since, was a "quartering wind," that is, a wind blowing on a vessel's
quarter, half way between her stern and the middle of her side. Ships
with better keels, sails, and shape of hull might have sailed with a
"soldier's wind," that is, a wind blowing straight against the ship's
side, at right angles to her course. But they must have "made leeway"
by going sideways too. This wind on the beam was called a soldier's
wind because it made equally plain sailing out and back again, and so
did not bother landsmen with a lot of words and things they could not
understand when ships tacked against head winds.

Who first "tacked ship" is more than we can say. But many generations
of seamen must have wished they knew how to sail